At 09:58 AM 1/7/97 -0500, Jon Zeeff wrote:
I'd like to point out that such things can be an invasion of privacy. While person A might claim that person B threatened to commit suicide, it is possible that person A wants to locate person B for other, not so good reasons.
This will happen if all one has to say is "suicide" and everyone will ignore their normal privacy policies.
I have dealt with this in the past and only given out the information to the local EMS system, and had /them/ use the information. I also did things like call back the original caller to make sure that I had valid contact info for them, etc etc (gives some level of ability to track things back if its a prank or harrasment or something.) As a side note, when I lived in Chicago I had a similar experience to the one mentioned above, (except I knew the name and address of the person already), and it took a /lot/ of time to get patched through to EMS and then to get EMS to actually believe me. To their credit the EMS dispatcher did call me back later to apologize for not believing me when it turned out that the person's life was saved. Justin Newton Network Architect Erol's Internet Services